Nura Sidarus

I’m a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, at Royal Holloway University of London, and an affiliated member of the Neuroscience of Mental Health group, at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL. I completed an MSc and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, at University College London, before receiving a Fyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the École Normale Supérieure, in Paris. I am interested in understanding how we make decisions and how we come to feel in control of our actions and their consequences, i.e. have a sense of agency. Combining cognitive, computational, and neuroimaging methods, my work aims to elucidate the (meta)cognitive mechanisms that support how we monitor and control our cognition and our actions. Thanks to an ESRC New Investigator Grant, I'm starting to explore how these (meta)cognitive processes may become maladaptive and underlie psychiatric symptoms, such as depression.